My pitas page

swiffer!
tonight is "clean the apartment night" in my household. am so looking forward to it, especially because i get to use this guy!

your iris as passport
this is so cool: soon, we will be using iris scans instead of passports to prove to foreign officials that we are who we say we are.

grown up babies
that would be me, contemplating taking adult swim lessons at the 92nd st. y this winter. i mean, better to do it now than when i'm 40, right? at least it shows i'm bright enough to fix the error of my ways while still limber. but getting there at 7am on a SUNDAY is going to totally suck.

opera, tonight, for free
that about sums it up. i've never been to one of the "summerstage" productions in central park, but i'm looking forward to a heaping helping of culture this evening. but first, must find a cheat sheet on "falstaff" somewhere on the web. technology is so wonderful :)

jane
went here for dinner on friday night, before seeing the horrible movie mentioned below. jane was completely un-horrible; the food was great, our little waiter guy was charming, and they do not try to shoo you out as quickly as possible. did i mention there are gruyere dumplings that come with the steak? and that i had peanut butter mousse for dessert and ate the whole thing? i should probably be dead of heart failure by now, really.

planet of the apes
saw this friday night. it was horrible. save your money.

dead intern in office
despite the fact that there may indeed be nothing suspicious about this young woman's death, how weird is it that this has not been picked up by the media?

public service
a funny story in this week's observer laying out block by block in nyc where there are more boys than girls. using census data to get laid: the thinking person's pick-up plan.

vacation in winter
the week between christmas and new years, boy and i are flying here, renting a car, and tooling around portugal and southern spain. it is official. i am so excited i could die-- so glad today is a somewhat abbreviated friday :) must now try to learn very basic spanish and portugese. wish me luck!

i want!
this website has such cool quirky stuff. it's british of course. sometimes i wish i was british so i could be cool, too.

modern library's top 100 novels list
in case you're curious.

1984, by george orwell
this is my new recreational reading selection, having finished and loved white teeth by zadie smith which you should all go out and read soon. i do not think i will like this book in the way i like, for example, cheese or milkshakes or even white teeth by zadie smith. but i think it is good for me to read it, since it means i will have read another book from the modern library's top 100 list, and it is one of those books i really ought to have read in high school or college but somehow didn't. so it'll be good for me, if not a pure joy to read. which is fine.

chase, evil
in the introduction a "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius" dave eggers writes something to the effect of "do not open an account at chase bank, they are evil." i never really thought about that until today when i experienced their evil firsthand. so i echo dave: do not open an account there. they are very unhelpful.

send your name to mars!

west wing: drama in so many ways
i will cry my eyes out if anything happens to make this show tank and go off the air. absolutely. cry. them. out. so they better all get their acts together and pull through this!

my horoscope
how funny is it that today's horoscope is so true. i guess they get it right sometimes. the plan has been changed to a new destination, but since it is still a plan and not a reality, i am going to stop talking about it now. i swear.

egypt: not gay-friendly
there are 52 men being tried in egypt right now for performing homosexual acts. yet another reason why--despite my deep desire to see the pyramids, and despite the fact that i'm not a gay man--egypt is not sounding like a good vacation spot these days.

"what's my 20"
this vh1 show is addictive and the website is even worse because you vote for the videos that go on the show! despite the fact that in some categories i couldn't pick even ten from the bands/songs they had listed (rob thomas as best frontman ever? puh-leez), it's still great fun.

graham dies
forget about the new york times. the washington post is the best newspaper in the u.s., mostly because of this fine lady and her hard work a few decades back. her death is truly a loss.

ciao, bella
i am lobbying pretty hard (well, not that hard at all, really) to go here on vaca over new year's, since that's basically the only week of the year that boy-and-i can both be fairly certain our jobby-job publicity efforts would be completely futile. perhaps an update will be warranted later this week...

park slope
amy and betsy moved from one part to another this weekend, and their apartment is just cute as a button. cannot wait to see how they make it cuter in the coming days/weeks.

salgado photo exhibit
this exhibit sounds really impressive, despite the criticisms in the story. again, something i would like to take in, though not necessarily this weekend. one can only do so much.

"legally blonde" finally opens!
ok, so the review isn't all glowing and fab, but it does have many positive things to say about this girlie, bubbly-looking flick. since i am single for the weekend, perhaps i shall take in a showing at some point and then go home and paint my toenails pale shimmery pink. anyone want to come along? (to the movie, i mean, if not necessarily the toenail painting afterwards, though of course you're invited to that as well.)

marks & spencer
how can they be reporting all these losses? amy and i gave them so much money just a few months ago!

dracula land
take that, disney! ...i really hope this happens and someday for some reason i have nothing better to do when in eastern europe so i can visit this park and get a t-shirt.

boring sex
the question has been asked many times before, but this piece just makes me so sad: if people are together as a couple for years and years, does sex get relegated to the back seat. i, and probably most of you out there, prefer to be optimists and say: it depends on the person/couple. which i think is right. but the guy in this couple in this story is just such a non-try-er it's depressing. becasue you just know there are scads of boys like him out there.

sorry, random house
the authors win in their e-book case againt the big old publishing industry. go authors!

why fatties are poor
ok, not exactly. but how often do i get to type the word "fatties"? basically, this little piece in salon explores why cuties get better raises than people who ain't cuties. it's all based in science, people, which is the best part.

evening gowns
a. has to go to a black tie wedding next weekend, and she has gone through a number of disasters over the past few weeks trying to find an evening gown for the occasion. last night, in a last-ditch effort, she came by to try on the two that i (for some inexplicable reason) own. and one fit--it's a bebe number i bought, like, four years ago in d.c. because i loved it so much and i figured maybe someday i would need an evening gown that makes me feel like a movie star. well, that occasion has yet to materialize, so a. will be wearing said dress out in public for its first time ever. and here's the link to bebe's website because while they tend to slut up their models, i think their clothes can be sexy in a refined way if you don't wear too much of their stuff at once.

the real time
if you're as anal-retentive as i am about what time it actually is so you can synchronize your watch and your computer clock, this is the site for you. well, as long as you're in the united states.

bastille day
is this saturday, so get your francais groove on and eat in style via epicurious.com.

reading for pleasure
finished graham greene last night, began this on the train this morning. quite different from the greene (which i really enjoyed and would heartily recommend unless you're already sad all the time) but i'm also liking "white teeth" a great deal. and the fact that zadie smith is my age only makes me a teensy bit depressed.

sam lightner's book

lit night
last night went here, to sebastian junger's bar half king, for their monday literary reading night. one of a.'s authors, sam lightner, was the featured presenter, and he did quite a good job of discussing his new book, which is linked to above. i was starving by the time i got there, ate every last bit of my fish-n-chips order, and proceeded to have nightmares all night long, getting very little sleep and skipping the gym this morning (bad). i don't know if the bad dreams were directly related to the fish-n-chips, but i think my one time at half king was enough. it's a nice place, though, if you're ever in that neck of the woods.

ikea, baby
one would think that trips to ikea, coming as infrequently in life as they do, would yield buckets of purchases. not always so, even if one goes to ikea twice in one weekend. we did a lot of couch-sitting to test out various models; none blew our socks off. the result: a great rug for the living room and an even greater lamp for the wall above the bed. cannot wait to do some snuggly warm nighttime reading this winter with a lamp as hip as this one.

time and time again
a couple of weeks ago, the battery in my watch died. so i had it replaced. the folks who replaced said battery then proceeded to break the knob on the watch, so that i could no longer adjust the time, and they had set the time to be ten minutes fast. those of you who know me know that there's no way that wouldn't drive me mad, to be permanently ten minutes ahead of the rest of the world. so i bought a new watch this weekend cause the other one was starting to look its age anyway. this is it, except it has a white face instead of a black one. i love it. i feel quite grown up and sophisticated and punctual with it.

mmmmmmm
it never occurred to me that grilled cheese could be made on a grill and not solely in a skillet. for some reason, grill-prepared grilled cheese sounds even more tempting and gooey and yum than traditional g.c.

so infuriating
i shouldn't be allowed to get this bent out of shape at 9:14 am. but: bush has a plan in the works that would make unborn children eligible for medical coverage. my thoughts: (1) why don't we first insure all the people in this country who are already born? there are so many, many, many people about there without health coverage that are actually alive and need it, it seems a shame to cover entities that are not born and are inside one of these already-born people, who could get coverage herself, which then covers the fetus by association. (2) this is the first step on a very slippery slope toward defining a fetus as an "unborn child," which then becomes "child," which means it's alive and there goes any hope of secure abortion rights for women in this country. yes, i know this is not a federal law bush is trying to get created--it would be up to states whether or not they wanted to provide such coverage--and i'm not saying pregnany women shouldn't get the best health care for their future-children. but there are already a bunch of states out there that treat women as complete morons who don't know what's best for themselves, and the thought of this big brother behavior being taken any further is just wrong.

revisionist history
ashcroft (yes, that ashcroft) said in a speech this week that god gave the united states its freedom. so i guess history teachers will be re-vamping their curriculae this summer to eliminate irrelevant things like the revolutionary war, the war of 1812, and so forth.

what i'm reading now
i figure it's about time i start reading authors that basically all good publishing types have read, but who i have managed to skip all these years. so i'm starting slowly with a nice thin one: "the end of the affair" by graham greene. i didn't see the movie, so it's all new to me, and i am quite enjoying it. i could barely tear myself away when getting off the subway for work this morning.

more a.i.
here's the review from "ain't it cool news," which really hits the nail on the head re: the movie's flaws and merits.

a.i.
yesterday morning being dreary, and having finished the laundry by 11 am (yikes), boy and i went to see this at the very nice battery park city cinemas. i really liked it until the last 20 minutes or so, when steven spielberg decided to push my suspension of disbelief just a tad too far. which is too bad. i would still recommend it to those of you who are like me and cry during movies even though you just KNOW the director/writer is trying to make you cry, and who are just plain sappy and like a good fairy tale/fantasy story. but i wouldn't rush to the theater or anything. rest of the day off: after getting out around 3 pm (it's a long film), boy and i sat on the roof and tanned and read before getting dinner out with his family, who are just the bee's knees, i must say. in all, a very good july 4th. now it is back to work today, which is hard to get excited about.

click here
to see the word "skankiest" used in the washington post. in a piece about NOW. fun!

the dinner game
with our new cable hook-up, we watched this on tv last night. it was indeed quite funny. recommended.

rcn cable, baby
the last-time i had full-on cable, with mtv and the history channel and all that, i must have been living in d.c. (aka, the land of plenty). the last time i had a cable package that included hbo and other such "premium channels", i think i was living at home. so last night, us getting big-time cable installed was a big-time deal. well, for me anyway. not that i really noticed, since i spent the evening completely tipsy from the one gin & tonic i consumed on an empty stomach when i got home from work. lesson learned: no more gin & tonic's on an empty stomach when i get home from work.

well, they promised
the leader of a cult that believes in extraterrestrial life has made a promise to the federal government not to experiment with human cloning in the u.s. until congress settles whether or not it's legal. so many funny things in this little story, reported by the new york times.

the million dollar vice president
cheney may have a pacemaker installed. how sad that the one semi-competent person in the white house is breaking down. (and calling him semi-competent does not mean i like him. just so we're all clear on that.)

it's movin' day
have i mentioned lately how i'm moving today/tomorrow into this fab apartment with a fab boy? if not, consider yourself informed. it's going to be really hard to focus on work today, and i'm only here for a pathetic three hours!

beer and girls
MADD is all bent out of shape because two south carolina politicians cracked wise about how a $4,500 scholarship could "buy a lot of beers and girls" because it belittles underage drinking. guess what: it also belittles girls, who apparently are buy-able sex objects. maybe someone could get bent out of shape about THAT. (besides me, of course...)